Science & Tech Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer draws a bright line that feels almost comforting in an age when scientific breakthroughs arrive faster than our moral vocabulary. The first sentence flatters science as an engine of capability: it maps the boundaries of the doable, turns yesterday's metaphysics into today's lab protocol. The second sentence yanks the wheel. Permission is not a technical category. It belongs to politics, religion, culture, law, and plain human squeamishness - domains that can be argued but not solved.

The rhetoric works because it’s a deliberate demotion of expertise. Krauthammer, writing as a journalist with a physician’s background and a public intellectual’s instinct for the pressure point, is warning against the modern temptation to treat "can" as a synonym for "should". That temptation shows up whenever a new tool - cloning, stem cells, gene editing, AI surveillance - arrives wrapped in the language of inevitability. "Science made me do it" becomes the alibi of institutions that would rather outsource ethical conflict to the lab coat.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense of democratic messiness. If permissibility can’t be derived from data, then moral authority can’t be monopolized by technocrats. That doesn’t mean science is irrelevant to ethics; it means science can inform the stakes without adjudicating the values. Krauthammer’s punchy parallelism is doing political work: reminding a culture drunk on innovation that the hardest questions are still about power, dignity, and limits - and those require argument, not instrumentation.